The short route to Florida

Before interstates and four-lane highways, U.S. 280 was the quickest drive from Birmingham to Florida’s beaches and the only route to outlying areas such as Chelsea. The winding road was so traveled by sun-seeking tourists it earned the lasting name of Florida Short Route, as denoted by a billboard from a Tallahassee motel that pointed 287 miles south. 

A branch of U.S. Highway 80 and running 390 miles from downtown Birmingham to Blichton, Ga., the route branches off to go south and east through Georgia to Florida’s Atlantic coast. Still today, U.S. 280 south of Birmingham shows up on road maps as Florida Short Route.

For a while in the 1920s, 280 was home to one of Alabama’s first roadside attractions. In See Alabama First: The Story of Alabama Tourism, author Tim Hollis writes about the Bottle, a 64-foot-tall wooden replica of a bottle of orange Nehi soda located five miles north of Auburn. Constructed in about 1924 by John F. Williams of Opelika, who owned the local Nehi bottling company, the Bottle housed a grocery store and gas station on the ground floor. A spiral staircase led to the upper portion where tourists could view the countryside from the bottle cap. The Bottle burned in 1933, but road maps still dot its location as “The Bottle, Alabama.”

Shortly after Alabama established speed limits in 1951, converting to posted limits as opposed to “reasonable and proper” speed guidelines, Alabama’s first speed trap sprang up on the heavily traveled Florida Short Route, Hollis said. In Harpersville, the Highway 280 speed limit “abruptly dropped to 25 miles per hour.” Motorists soon complained, and the town stopped patrolmen from their practice of collecting arbitrary amounts of money from tourists who did not want to come back to the town for a court date. However, many towns on Florida Short Route and other routes lowered their speed limits and posted patrolmen. So, with speed limits came the now-expected speed trap on the way to the beach.

In addition to being the quickest way to Florida, early U.S. 280 was the only route to Birmingham for residents in Chelsea, Columbiana and other nearby towns.

“It seemed like it took hours to get to my grandmother’s house,” recalls Sandy Crumpton, the Shelby County Historical Society’s archivist, who grew up in Columbiana and remembers riding through the famous 280 Narrows and over the mountains to Grandma’s house in west Jefferson County. 

The Narrows, the picturesque Yellow Leaf Creek gorge section of the old highway, had nicknames including “War Eagle Highway,” as it leads to Auburn University, and “Blood Bucket Road” because of the accidents on the narrow roadway, said Bobby Joe Seales, president of the Shelby County Historical Society. 

Many vehicle accidents occurred on the Narrows’ winding curves, and its hills and hallows hid whiskey stills back when store-bought liquor was forbidden or too far away. Reportedly, a gambling casino was once located along the Narrows, Seales said. Historians from half a century ago also reported that the rocks in the Narrows were the oldest found in North America at that time.

The original U.S. 280 section in Shelby and Jefferson counties was built in the 1920s and completed in the early 1930s. Reportedly constructed with convict and Works Progress Administration labor, the route through the Narrows was blasted with hand-operated churn drills and dynamite, according to a 1981 article in the Shelby County Reporter. 

When Highway 280 was finally expanded to four lanes – a project that began in the late 1970s for the stretch south of Birmingham and continues today in some parts of Georgia — the new, wider highway detoured around the Narrows. Old U.S. 280’s most scenic stretch became Shelby County Road 280, but it remains, to many, the Florida Short Route.

Quick, quirky short route stops

A Habitat for Humanity’s Slum Theme Park

721 W. Church St., Americus, Ga.

Along the long trek of the short route, stretch your legs in Americus at the Slum Theme Park that puts you right in the middle of a third world slum. Take a self-guided tour through the “poverty section” featuring rows of shanty homes with rags for doors, and learn about the deadly kissing bugs. 

Vidalia Onion Museum 

100 Vidalia Sweet Onion Drive, Vidalia, Ga. 

Your next stop along the short route takes you to Vidalia’s onion legacy. You will enjoy a hands-on educational opportunity about the Vidalia onions’ significance in the country not just economically, but in the culinary world as well. Meet the onion with Chef Bobby Flay’s seal of approval.  

Fruitcake Capital of the World 

203 West Main St., Claxton, Ga.

Shortly before your drive to Blitchton, Ga., is complete you will find yourself in Claxton, the fruitcake capital of the world.  Take a peak at The Claxton Fruitcake Co.’s seven giant fruitcake ovens, and taste why Claxton Fruit Cake was the only fruitcake exhibited at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and 1965.